Lake in the Clouds (19 page)

“It won’t be easy for him to leave his work behind.”

For a moment Elizabeth thought of Manny at the African Free School, and then she realized what Curiosity was trying to say.

“The voyagers.”

Curiosity nodded. “I expect he feeling mighty torn right now.”

“But you must be—” Elizabeth stopped herself.

“Relieved. I surely am, I cain’t deny it. We never do talk about it, but many the night me and Leo have laid awake thinking about him getting caught. He’d hang before we could get there to say a prayer for him. So I’m relieved, yes. And I’m feeling guilty too. All those souls needing a hand on the way.” She shook her head and pushed out a great sigh. “I expect you know that I’m here to ask you for something. Except it ain’t easy.”

“Anything,” Elizabeth said. “You know that.”

“Wait till you hear it,” said Curiosity. “Afore you go jumping in with that yes.” She paused. “Hawkeye all ready to set out north for Little Lost?”

Elizabeth nodded. “He is.”

“If I had my way I’d go with them”—she held up a hand to keep Elizabeth from interrupting—“but I cain’t. I move too slow, and anyway, it would be as good as waving a flag if I was to disappear like that. It’ll be work enough keeping clear of Liam once he picks up the scent.”

“It will not,” Elizabeth said firmly. “There are very few men who could track Hawkeye in the bush, and Liam is not one of them, as you know well enough.”

Curiosity said, “What I know is, her time is close. Too close, maybe.”

They were silent for a moment together.

“She really is in good hands,” Elizabeth said, but with less conviction. She had great faith in her father-in-law, but she could hardly imagine him delivering a baby. “If Richard
hadn’t arranged for Hannah to go with Kitty …” She said this more to herself than Curiosity, and did not finish what they both knew.

Curiosity rocked forward again, her expression so tense that Elizabeth imagined she could see the pulse in her throat, just as she could feel her own heartbeat quicken. She knew now what Curiosity had come to ask, but she must wait to hear the words.

“But you could go, Elizabeth, if you had a mind to.”

Elizabeth drew in a breath and let it out again. “It’s been almost ten years since I last went into the bush. Those were desperate times.”

Curiosity’s wide-set eyes, so clear and dark, met Elizabeth’s evenly. “Desperate times,” she said softly. “They got a way of coming round again when you ain’t looking.”

Elizabeth got up to go to the window. So many trees, as far as a man could walk in a month or more, trees without end. Curiosity was asking her to go into the endless forests with Selah Voyager, to see her safely to the people who would take her in, people like herself, other runaways who had found safety together deep in the bush. On his own Hawkeye could get to the meeting place at Little Lost in two days walking as hard as he could, but with Selah the journey would take four days or five. More, if the child decided to come early.

She wanted to say no. There were so many reasons to stay on the mountain, with her own children. But then Curiosity had once left her family behind to go with Elizabeth on a much longer and more dangerous journey. Curiosity had helped her bring Robbie into the world, and she had been there, too, when he left it. She had taken him out of her arms at the end, and tended to him as if he was her own. It was Curiosity who had brought them through those dark days.

Desperate times got a way of coming round again when you ain’t looking.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Of course I will go with her.”

Curiosity closed her eyes briefly and opened them again, but before she could speak, Elizabeth had started to talk again.

“I imagine you’ve already figured out what I should do about the school?”

Curiosity smiled. “As a matter of fact, why yes. Seem to me that the urge to go down to the city with Kitty and Hannah
going to come over you right sudden. They planning to set out at first light on Monday—won’t nobody know if you went north or south, not until they back home again.”

“That is a very delicate operation you’re proposing.” Elizabeth thought for a long moment. “But it might well work. It is believable, at any rate, that Kitty might persuade me at the last minute. What about Richard?”

“You leave Richard to me,” said Curiosity.

“Gladly. The twins will be unhappy about this, of course.” She looked out the window, as if she hoped to catch sight of them. “There’s something I need from you.”

“You know you don’t have to ask me to look after those children,” said Curiosity.

Elizabeth smiled. “I do know that. With you and Many-Doves and Hawkeye they will do very well.”

She looked out the window again and remembered Daniel climbing through it, set on rescuing them all. How sure he was of himself, how completely dedicated to the task he had set himself. Her sweet son, at ease in the world in a way she had never been, might never be. He had that from his father, and from his grandfather.

“It isn’t so much the twins I’m worried about as Nathaniel. He would take any risk upon himself, you know that. But he won’t like the idea of me taking this on. You’ll have to help me convince him.”

Curiosity had a warming smile, and she used it now. “Why, Elizabeth, I’m surprised at you. Married all this time and you cain’t think how to get what you want. That ain’t no mystery at all.”

Elizabeth sat back. “Is that so? And what exactly is it that I want?”

“You know the man cain’t deny you a thing,” said Curiosity. “All you got to do is ask him, and he’ll follow you to the ends of the earth.”

It was easier than she imagined, so easy that Elizabeth wondered if Curiosity hadn’t presented her plan to Nathaniel first. Together they would take Selah Voyager to Red Rock; Hawkeye would stay behind to keep an eye on Lake in the Clouds. Selah Voyager was so obviously relieved when they told her that Elizabeth wondered at herself; she should have
known that the girl would be frightened, and would want a woman with her.

The plan sat well with everyone but the twins. Daniel had gone off to voice his discontent to Many-Doves; Lily had not yet given up the fight.

“It ain’t fair,” she repeated, sitting straight-backed in her outrage. Elizabeth tried to focus on the hair she was plaiting, as temperamental and untamable as the child herself.

“Perhaps not,” she conceded. “But it is necessary. You know we would not leave you behind otherwise.”

Lily would certainly have had more arguments to offer, but she was trying to listen to the men talking in the next room.
Little Lost,
they heard clearly, and
the Prophet.
Runs-from-Bears asked about weapons and Lily sat up straighter. Elizabeth was torn between wanting to listen and feeling the need to distract a daughter with an overly active imagination.

She said, “When I go to Johnstown in September, you will come with me, if you like.”

Lily said, “I would rather go to Albany.”

“When you are offered a gift it is right that you say ‘thank you’ before you find fault with it, Lily.”

“Thank you, and I’d rather go to Albany.”

Elizabeth secured the plait with the hair ribbon that had been found after much searching, wound around a bundle of twigs.

“I will consider taking you to Albany—”

Lily tensed expectantly.

“—if you will make me a promise.”

The narrow shoulders sagged. “I know what you want. It’s always the same thing, Ma. You want me to be helpful and cheerful and not to argue.”

“Of course,” said Elizabeth. “But there is something else as well.” She went to the shelf on the wall and took down a small book of blank pages she had sewn together. Then she sat down next to her daughter on the edge of the bed and put it in her lap.

“I should like it if you wrote a little every day about what happens while we are gone,” she said. And seeing Lily’s wary expression she said, “Just a few sentences. So that when we come home we can see what you’ve been up to.”

Lily cast her a thoughtful expression out of the corner of her eye. “That’s a job for Daniel, Ma.”

“Ah,” said Elizabeth. “But then we’d have only your brother’s side of the story.”

This made an impression. Lily stroked the paper with one finger where Elizabeth had inscribed her name on the cover: Mathilde Caroline Bonner.

She had been named for Elizabeth’s mother.
She has Caroline’s chin,
her father had announced, when he first saw Lily.
I fear she will carry on in the same vein.

Her father had feared the women he loved: his sister, his wife, his daughter; he had feared their sense of themselves and their independence. In the past few years, watching her own daughter at odds with the world, Elizabeth had finally begun to understand the nature of such fear.

Lily was studying the paper in front of her with a kind of gentle curiosity that was absent when she picked up her slate at school.

She said, “May I use your pen?”

Elizabeth bit back a smile. Trust Lily to negotiate better terms for herself at every turn.

“You are not satisfied with a quill?”

“There’s no flow to a quill, Ma. Makes me feel like I’m scratching in the dirt, like a hen.” Lily’s expression was so furious and intense that Elizabeth was reminded of her as a toddler, howling at the moon when her schemes proved too ambitious, for even at that age her mind had been so nimble that the rest of her had trouble keeping up.

Nathaniel had brought Elizabeth her pen as a gift when Robbie was born. It was a huge extravagance, but it was also something she had wanted for a long time and Nathaniel hadn’t forgotten. A pen was a wondrous contrivance that held more ink than a quill, never needed to be sharpened, and sat easily in the hand. Hers was made of mahogany inset with carved ivory. The shaft tapered down to a delicate nib of copper and silver, and required careful handling. The children were no more allowed to take up their mother’s pen than their father’s rifle.

The distinction, Elizabeth admitted to herself, was that the men had begun teaching both twins how to handle weapons a year ago. Daniel showed all the signs of becoming as good a marksman as his father and grandfather before him, but Lily was too short still to handle a long rifle.

Elizabeth reached over and pulled her daughter into her lap. For a moment Lily resisted, and then she collapsed against Elizabeth’s breast.

“I don’t want you to go,” she mumbled.

“I know, I know that.” And stopped herself from making promises she could not keep.

“If you have to go then Hannah should stay,” Lily said more clearly.

Elizabeth rocked her daughter and stroked her head, and said nothing. Lily knew very well that Hannah must go to the city. She had listened to all the discussions, and then consoled herself by writing a list of things she wanted her sister to bring home with her. No doubt Lily would have happily gone without sweets and hair ribbons and her own skinning knife if it meant keeping Hannah at home while Elizabeth was away, but there was more at stake.

Elizabeth must go with Selah Voyager, and Hannah must go to New-York City if the children were to be vaccinated against the smallpox. Not even to comfort the daughter would Elizabeth consider letting that opportunity pass.

After a few minutes, Lily pulled away and rubbed her eyes hard.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll write something every day. But when you come home, then will you let me practice with your pen?”

“Every evening, if you like,” said Elizabeth.

Lily put her hands on her mother’s face and looked at her solemnly. “You’ll be gone in the morning, won’t you?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth, drawing in a sharp breath and letting it out again. “We’ll be gone in the morning.”

By the third day of roaming Hidden Wolf with a warrant tucked into his shirt, Liam Kirby had to admit to himself that the two things he wanted most were not going to happen: the dogs could find no trace of the runaway, and the Bonner men weren’t going to be provoked into a confrontation.

Sitting in an elm at the edge of old Judge Middleton’s homestead in the drizzling rain, Liam looked down at his dogs, sound asleep around the trunk of the tree. They were good trackers every one, but by the time he got back from Johnstown the trail was cold and the rain had done its work. Or maybe, the thought came to him reluctantly, maybe the woman who had put a knife in Hubert Vaark’s throat wasn’t on the mountain anymore. She might be dead, or maybe Nathaniel had moved her north while Liam was busy talking the magistrate into giving him a warrant. Or maybe she was still sitting in the caves under the falls, just waiting for him to tire of the chase.

From his perch in the elm, Liam had a clear view of the path that came up around the hill and the house itself, every window in the lower floor filled with light. The faint sound of fiddles tuning up came to him, undercut by the trill of a pennywhistle.

People had been trickling up from the village for an hour, most of them on foot. Some he recognized: Peter Dubonnet and his sister, the Camerons, Charlie LeBlanc; others were strangers to him. There was no sign of the Bonners, not yet.
He had been walking their mountain for three days, and never seen any of them.

What he had found on Hidden Wolf was something he had never missed, or thought to look for: his own boyhood. Deep in the bush on the north side of the mountain the last ten years were wiped away like a frost in the June sun. Every familiar tree and beaver pond dragged him back a little further to a place he didn’t want to go. Streams where he had fished, the spot where he had set his first trap, the stump of the first pine he had felled. The Big Muddy, where Billy had taught him how to carve the castoreum gland out of the sopping beaver carcass, laughing at him when he gagged on the stench. Another spot, better hidden, where he had showed him the fine points of poaching other men’s lines.

No saint, his brother Billy, but in all the years on the seas Liam hadn’t thought much about that side of him. Instead he had remembered Billy’s hands, as hard as boards, his fists even harder. He remembered the scar on his neck, the blue of his eyes, the way he would howl with laughter when he was on his way to being drunk. He remembered Billy at work. Whatever else he had been, Billy Kirby had never shirked a task. He was willing to put his hand to any work that paid, in coin or goods. When Billy died he left Liam alone in the world, without even a single blood relative.